Walking Cinema

We make apps, podcasts, and digital stories set in the real world

Why Walking Cinema?

Good stories have always had a level of immediacy to them. Walking Cinema works with museums, filmmakers, and broadcast media to create digital stories that inspire audience exploration of the real of world.

WALKING CINEMA: Museum of the Hidden City

Summary: This combination pop-up museum, mobile app, and documentary film explores the history of affordable housing through four overlapping characters: a woman living in a luxury affordable apartment, an forward-thinking urban planner, a journalist who specializes in walking the city, and the kingpin who forcibly displaced and replaced low-income residents throughout San Francisco.

CCA Course: Landmarks, Memory, and Mobile Media

Summary: Michael Epstein, founder of Walking Cinema, teaches an interdisciplinary studio course at the California College of Art. The course digs into narrative and production techniques for telling stories about landmarks around the city. By landmarks we are talking old/new, built/human, visible/psychological. The course examines location-based storytelling through various media forms: from text to audio to video.

Walking Cinema: Posts from Gloucester

Summary: Hired by Cambridge7 Associates to create a digital storytelling layer for harbor redevelopment of America's oldest fishing town. Made use of real world installations such as a granite markers, dry-docked boats, photo installations, and a fisherman's shack in tandem with handheld media.

Awards: 2013 Gold Muse Award, American Alliance of Museums

Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill

Summary: Received Digital Humanities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and partnered with PBS American Experience director to produce a unique location-based extension of a documentary film. The story of a Harvard professor accused of killing the richest man in Boston in the mid-19th century is told among the remnants of the crime still lurking in modern-day Boston.

Awards: 2010 New Media Award, Boston International Film Festival

Walking Cinema: The Legend of Casteo

Summary: Worked with Venice Biennale, MIT Senseable Cities Lab, and IUAV Design School in Venice to develop a first-ever location-based mobile documentary about craftsmen living around the world's leading contemporary art exhibit. A Gondola-builder, operatic fisherman, and an erotic glass blower guide you into hidden spaces in Venice's last local neighborhood.

Awards: Purchased by Venice Biennale to be part of permanent exhibit, featured in Wired, Corriere della Sera, and semi-finalist in MIT 100K Competition.